Young, political and social change: epistemological potentialities poststructuralism to study political subjects and subversion of meaning. Some criticisms of the neoliberal juventología

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to review the challenges and potentials of problematizing the relationship between Youths and Politics from the post-structuralist Discourse Analysis. First, we will present the theoretical and ontological axioms of this perspective, which identifies a logical constitution of social order, the operation of the logic of politics and mode of construction of collective identities. Then, we will go around some of the approaches of traditional youths studies, distinguishing two epistemological problems in thinking youth: essentialism and causality. We will propose overcome those crossroads resizing the materiality of the symbolic. Furthermore, we will discuss how the pioneering work in Argentina in the 90s have formulated -to our understanding- a category of youth from a neoliberal matrix and, therefore, it becomes necessary to point out their outdated forms and propose certain commutes. Finally, we will design a proposal to analyze youth as political subjects and to see the role they play in social transformation -in other words, in the subversion of meaning- starting from their demands and projects